German Investigators Are Building Case Against Others Implicated in Foiled Plot

A guard checked a car at the Ramstein Air Base Thursday. Officials say suspects may have been planning to strike the base.Credit
Ralph Orlowski/Getty Images

KARLSRUHE, Germany, Sept. 6 — German investigators were trying to build a case on Thursday against a handful of suspects beyond the three arrested in connection with a foiled terrorist attack by Islamic militants, and German officials prepared to debate whether security services should be given wider surveillance powers.

Officials know the identities and whereabouts of several of the seven suspects still at large, some still in Germany, according to the federal prosecutor’s office. Their homes were among about 30 properties raided this week, said Andreas Christeleit, a spokesman for the federal prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe.

“They are not fugitives; we know where they are,” Mr. Christeleit said. But the authorities lacked the evidence to arrest them, he said, without adding any specifics. Others, he said, are abroad, and two are known only by aliases.

The three men arrested Tuesday — two German citizens who had converted to Islam and a Turkish resident of Germany — remained in custody. Information that surfaced during about nine months of investigation, which included the monitoring of phone calls and the tracking of the suspects’ movements, led the authorities to conclude that the possible targets included the Ramstein Air Base, a crucial transportation hub for the American military, and Frankfurt International Airport.

August Hanning, state secretary at the Interior Ministry and the former director of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, said the suspects were part of the cell that for months had been planning to carry out attacks against American targets.

“This is the network that we are aware of at the moment,” Mr. Hanning told the ARD public television channel. He added that the cell had been splintered and no longer posed a direct security threat. Nevertheless, he warned that Germany remained a target for Islamic terrorists.

Among the suspects still at large are German converts to Islam, Turkish residents of Germany and citizens of other countries, he said.

According to an official close to the investigation, at least one of the men is Pakistani and another is Lebanese. At least one of them left Germany to go to Turkey, but since then he may have traveled elsewhere, the official said. He declined to be identified because the investigation is still active.

As the security forces pursued their investigation, Germany’s 16 state interior ministers were preparing to hold a special meeting on Friday in Berlin where they will try to agree on what new security measures can be adopted.

Photo

Credit
The New York Times

The meeting coincides with a new poll showing that a growing number of Germans believe that they will be personally affected by a terrorist attack over the next 10 years. A report published Thursday by the German Marshall Fund of the United States said 70 percent of Germans said they were likely to be affected by international terrorism, compared with 38 percent in 2005.

The interior ministers belong to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative party, the Christian Democratic Union, or to her coalition partners, the Social Democrats. They are sharply divided over what measures to adopt.

Moreover, the Interior Ministry, led by the conservatives, and the Justice Ministry, which is under the Social Democrats, are at odds over striking a balance between protecting civil liberties and protecting citizens against possible terrorist attacks.

Wolfgang Schäuble, the conservative federal interior minister, who for months has called for tougher security measures, made it clear this week that he wanted to expand investigators’ reach using highly debated techniques.

The techniques include sending fake e-mail messages with Trojan horse viruses to suspects to help security agents conduct two types of searches: “perusal” and longer-term “surveillance.”

Mr. Schäuble has also called for rules allowing investigators to ban some terrorist suspects from using mobile phones to undermine their ability to communicate, in a proposal that appears to be modeled on similar measures already in place in Britain, and for new powers to punish people who have been to camps where they are trained in terrorist methods to attack the West.

After the announcement of the arrests in the latest case, Mr. Schäuble appeared to be winning more support from his party. “It is time we introduced this special surveillance of private computers,” Wolfgang Bosbach, parliamentary deputy leader of the Christian Democrats and the party’s interior affairs spokesman, said in an interview. “Terrorists are using the Internet to organize conspiracies. We have to be able to monitor what they are doing and planning.”

Mr. Schäuble has also won support from Günther Beckstein, interior minister from the staunchly conservative southern state of Bavaria. Mr. Beckstein said Thursday that it was crucial to be able to use spying software for private computers since they would help the security services.

But Mr. Schäuble’s proposals have been challenged by several senior Social Democrats who accused him of using the foiled terrorist plot as an excuse to introduce tougher security measures.

Brigitte Zypries, the justice minister, said she was skeptical about Mr. Schäuble’s plans. She told German radio that clear limits were needed to protect civil rights, the rule of law and people’s privacy.

The Social Democrats, aware of the public’s growing concern about possible terrorist attacks, have to walk a fine line between protecting civil liberties and providing security. For this reason, Sebastian Edathy, a legislator and an interior affairs expert for the Social Democrats, said the Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of Parliament, should wait until the federal constitutional court, the country’s highest court, rules on the constitutionality of a similar online search law that the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia tried to adopt last year.

Katrin Bennhold reported from Karlsruhe, and Judy Dempsey from Berlin.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: German Investigators Are Building Case Against Others Implicated in Foiled Plot. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe